We’ve got the lastest Macbook Pro Retina 15” at Pro Tools Expert HQ so we thought we’d take it for a spin to see how it handles Pro Tools 11. This is the ‘stuck on a plane or in a hotel room’ test, just the Macbook Pro, internal soundcard and internal drive, it’s just you, your Mac, an iLok, headphones and a USB micro keyboard.

Is it just fit for a few demo tracks or can you get some real work done… find out below.

Test Machine Specification

MacBook Pro

Intel Core i7

Processor Speed: 2.5 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 4

L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

L3 Cache: 6 MB

Memory: 16 GB

Pro Tools Session Specification

Internal Mac soundcard used

Pro Tools 11.2.1

96Khz - maximum with internal sound card

24 bit

5 minutes of mono audio, with edits at every 1 second

Volume automation recorded on every track

Disk cache disabled to emulate native versions of Pro Tools

All audio tracks had an instance of Avid Channel Strip and Dverb inserted

Results Of Test

128 Audio tracks reached, but then Pro Tools ran out of voices

A mono audio track would record without issue along with 127 audio tracks in playback

Instrument tracks were then added

64 MIDI tracks with an instance of AIR Boom running with MIDI data

The session would not play at H/W buffer sizes of under 1024, once settled it seemed to run at 1024 without any further issues. The session could be set to 2048 samples if this was required and at this setting the session ran without issue.

Summary

It’s highly unlikely one would use a Macbook with the internal sound card, but should the need arise this test shows that it should offer you enough juice to work anywhere with a pretty demanding session.